You will learn as an educator that it is important to engage students with prior experiences.

What is similar that you KNOW about to what I am about to teach? What can I use from your own situation and life experiences to assist you in understanding? How can I model this instructional procedure or objective disguising it or applying it to the real world?

Very often we’ll use money. Food. The cost of food. Dimensions of familiar objects. Stats of athletes or cars or surveys the students themselves created and administered. Are we having the opposite problem the electronic games industry might be having, according to one company? Here’s an article discussing a new Indie games company “No Goblin”.

Today I witnessed a word problem I had not seen before. http://connectedmath.msu.edu/CD/Grade6/Locker/
The problem and the solution are good examples used to elicit and showcase problem-solving skills and teaching techniques not commonly encountered or seldom considered in a ‘normal’ classroom.

Great. Fantastic even! but…

Are educators also relying on the strengths of situated cognition as a theme for engagement?